I’ve always been a little fascinated by projects that take viewers unknowingly over a boundary into a different reality. On a base level they’re often just fun to interact with, but they also point to the ways in which all realities are constructed (usually with intention, through power), and to how porous the boundaries between those realities can be.
When I was in undergrad, one of my favorite art pieces was Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera’s “Fauna”. The series (also known as “Secret Fauna” or “Dr. Ameisenhaufen’s Fauna”) was shown in the late 1980’s in The United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and England, and was an archive of photographs, field notes, x-rays, drawings, tapes, video, and taxidermy—supposedly collected from a zoologist who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1955.
Despite the fact that photographs have been altered and faked to inform belief for as long as photography has existed (see: spiritualist ectoplasm), and also despite the absolute absurdity of the archive——which included photos of winged elephants and what I can only describe as a centaur-baboon (chimera!), a not-insignificant percentage of viewers believed it was truly a long lost archive of a real man, his real explorations, and real discoveries. Many people who recognized the deception (whether initially or later) were angry with it.
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I would classify the exhibition as play. Fontcuberta and Formiguera didn’t seem to be making any kind of analysis or critique through the piece——which makes me less interested in it now, 15 or so years after I first saw it———but I do think it’s a good piece to consider when discussing the nature of archives. For contrast, one might look at Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, and Paula Heredia’s “Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” (a few years later, in the early 1990’s), which featured (FINISH DESCRIBING THE EXHIBITION). The piece was a “satirical comment on the past”, directly examining practices of anthropology and human exhibition in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and was seminal “in several threads in art history including institutional museum critique, post-colonial debate, problematic representations of cultural otherness, and para/fictional art” (Gómez-Peña).
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In 2012, while I was studying arts education at RISD in Providence, I had my own foray into imagined archives. I installed a series of objects (which I bought at the Salvation Army thrift store) in fake archeological digs in Fox Point park, near my apartment. Each “dig” had wooden kitchen skewers shoved into the ground, gridded out with twine, in no particular measurement, with a business card taped nearby. A URL on the card led to the website of a made up anthropological society (poorly disguised, it was a wordpress site, complete with the free URL). The site had digital photographs of my best friend “uncovering” the dig sites, dusting away at them with a paintbrush; as well as black and white portraits aged with tea, of myself (mis)using the objects. Alongside the images was written information about a community of occultists who had supposedly lived in the neighborhood in the 1880’s.
The lone comment on the site was from a member of my neighborhood association, asking if I could reach out to them with more information about the community, to include in their online records.
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Like “Fauna”, this was just play, but it gave me direct insight into that porous nature of belief. The guy from the neighborhood association had to be kidding, right? Are we so used to (SOMETHING ABOUT HOW BUREAUCRATIC WEBSITES/PRACTICES ARE SO BAD, THAT IT DOESN’T TAKE AWAY FROM THE BELIEVABILITY TO THE NON-CRITICAL OBSERVER?)
The following summer I was working at Beam Camp in New Hampshire (a radical construction and collaboration-based residential camp for young folks age 9-17) and I recreated the project with a group of campers (I didn’t tell them about my project, because I didn’t want my imagined society to influence theirs).
add:
collective worldbuilding, why it was a radical practice for the young folks
maybe lead into a connection about QAnon (the society the kids built was a secret one)
more strongly contextualize archives as things that build/produce histories rather than simply reflect them.
possibly also connect this to elements i’ve been looking at like the blair witch project’s website